General Questions

hi guys & Girls.

I have another problem and that is when i start the torrent program it keeps getting collisions on the lan interface.

1 days torrent using is aprox 13954426 collisions.

Do you wanna help me? Whats causing this? could it be the router? or something i missed in the firewall settings?

thanks in advance

What does it show for the rest of the LAN interface on that page?  What is the LAN interface plugged into?

Collisions aren't necessarily bad, depending on what type of equipment you're using they may be unavoidable.

Yeah, I have to agree, collisions are not as bad as the sound. It sounds like there is a lot of other activity going on with the LAN side, how many other clients are sharing LAN with you?

I have 2 Computers running Vista x64 Ultimate and one each of the following, wii, xbox & dreambox.

I have no problems with collisions when not using utorrent. but asap i start utorrent on one of the computers it starts to record Collisions. and its only on the default Lan port.

All of the things except the WII is connected thru a 6 or 7 year old 10/100 switch. It could be this one that causes the problem, what do you think?

I've seen collisions storms on bad Ethernet cables before, old switch, seems it would make everything go weird, but it only happens during a torrent, tough one to nail down really without a lot of trail and error.

Sorry for not being an network expert, but how can you get collisions on a switched network?
No matter how old it is.
Can someone explain a little about this, would be great to know, since in theory when reading books no such things are supposed to happen.

Off topic maybe, but if anyones up to it it would be great

[on both ends]

Sorry for not being an network expert, but how can you get collisions on a switched network?
No matter how old it is.
Can someone explain a little about this, would be great to know, since in theory when reading books no such things are supposed to happen.

That's why I asked what the LAN is plugged into - if it's an old hub, you're going to be running half duplex and hence collisions will be normal. You won't see them much under light load, but under higher load especially higher packets per second rates that things like torrents induce, it'll happen frequently. This is different since it's a switch.

I also asked for everything it shows for LAN on Status -> Interfaces. Letalis: can you post a copy/paste of that?

If it's a switch it should be set to autonegotiate and all your devices should be set to autonegotiate. Then all the devices and the switch should be running at full duplex, which makes collisions impossible.

What commonly happens to cause collisions on switched networks is forcing speed and duplex improperly. If you force the switch or the device plugged into the switch, and not both, you end up with a duplex mismatch that will cause serious performance problems. That's the cause of virtually all collisions you'll see on a switched network. It's best to leave everything on auto to avoid that. These are late collisions and are much worse than the normal collisions on a half duplex network.

Some switches and network drivers are flaky and won't autonegotiate properly. In that case, forcing speed and duplex on both ends is a solution, but I would first ensure the switch's firmware is fully up to date and all network drivers are up to date. Never force on one end and not the other, and avoid it entirely as much as possible.

Sorry for not being an network expert, but how can you get collisions on a switched network?
No matter how old it is.
Can someone explain a little about this, would be great to know, since in theory when reading books no such things are supposed to happen.

Off topic maybe, but if anyones up to it it would be great

It's not impossible, just that switched networks are more likely not to than say a hub. A hub is like a giant hallway in which you have many rooms attached and everyone that is in each room is yelling into the hallway trying to communicate with someone else. So if you get more than 2 people talking, you get "collisions" in which sometimes the people can't hear who they are talking to. So the person has to repeat what they said.

Switches are more like having the same hallway, but instead of yelling, everyone has a cell phone to talk to each other. But if two people are trying to call the same person on their cell phone, they can only talk to one person at a time, then switch to the other call and say something. If you get too many people trying to call that single person on a cell phone (say for this example, more than 2 people), the third person gets a busy and must wait until one or the other drops the call to get a call into that target person.  Over simplifying of course, but a switch can only redirect so many packets at once and still maintain good performance for the other clients needing to send packets around. So in the case of a torrent where you are getting hit with many packets from all over the place at once, it might be filling up the state table in the switch faster than it can switch the packets, dump the queue and move on.

I will post it asap I can.

I have been using my old router again due to some minor problems with the network config. But please bear with me a few days and I'll post how it looks like.
The Router I'm been using is a Trendnet TE-100 DX8 from 2004

http://trendnet.com/langen/downloads/list_subcategory.asp?TYPE_ID=27&SUBTYPE_ID=127

I'm gonna order a new gigabit router when I have installed a full (cable)network in the house.